RAID solution needed for HP-UX and INGRES Database

[Neil J. Glennon]

I need a fault tolerance solution for our HP-UX 10.20 and Ingres 6.4 environment. I was steered toward the AutoRAID. However, I have had conflicting reports. We are currently running 10.20 on a K420. This will shortly be updated to 11 and an L series running Ingres II.

These are the options I can see.

* XP256
* FC60
* AutoRAID 12H
* MirrorDisk with a disk enclosure

The budget or corporate needs to not extend to the XP and FC60 range.

Are there other solutions for this environment?

Any help is most appreciated

[Maarten van Maanen]

I don't know anything about Ingres nor do I know how large your databases are.
We use a 12H for our Oracle environment and it is performing well (both internally and externally for Internet-access by our customers).
Remember that a 12H contains a maximum of 12 HDD's and that for optimum performance this means with 12 18Gb HDD's you will get 158Gb capacity with Hotspare on en and 174 GB with Hotspare off. This might not be enough and that would mean more 12H's.

Maarten van Maanen
Netherlands

[Tim Malnati]

In terms of the options that become available for deversification, the XP256 is clearly superior. But this could be overkill too. I'm confused about what your trying to say with, "The budget or corporate needs to not extend to the XP and FC60 range." By comparison the Autoraid is not cheap. In my mind, the autoraid is best for situations when SA's don't have any idea how the data is being utilized and/or won't have the opportunity to properly allocate data to the appropraite raid configuration. But I wonder how well this unit exports from one platform to another. The others are usually not much more than switching connectivity and performing the appropriate vgexport and vgimport sequences with very little fanfare. But this statement is only valid for non-root volume groups.

[Dave Wherry]

As Tim said, the XP may be overkill. I have one and really like it. It's a lot of box for a small database though.
EMC has a smaller entry level unit. It too will be expensive. However if you compare it to buying an XP that you will never fill out, it is a better deal.
I also have AutoRaids and FC30 (Nike) arrays. They simply can not compare to an XP or EMC.
EMC always plays hard ball on pricing. They will move if they know you are considering an XP.